Battlefield 3 is Also A Multiplayer Game

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Easy to forget, isn’t it? With BF3 increasingly pitched as the military shooter to beat this year (though only an apocalypse event could prevent MW3 from outselling it, I fear), some of us have perhaps lost sight of BF3’s true purpose: epic-scale online manshooting. Here’s the first official taste of it, lending a sense of just how the FrostBite 2 engine scales itself to massed, non-scripted battles. Also, as a free bonus to you, my favourite reader, there’s another video showing off the various capabilities of said engine.
This is a taste of the stuff Jim frothed about from the E3 live feed yesterday, but neatly compacted into trailer form for you:

That’s from a level named Operation Metro, which fortunately isn’t all about small, underground, confined spaces as the name might suggest. It’s set in Paris, and it looks frantic and intense. Could it really look like that in practice? If so, the escalation we’ve wanted from multiplayer manshoots for so long might finally be upon us.

And here’s the bombastic, chest-thumping Frostbite 2 shower-offer:

PC in-game footage, is says at the bottom. Yeah, no shit. What else could do that? /Me salutes.

@Steven Hutton
The more copies a quality shooter sells, the better the industry (you know, people encouraged to make an effort because trends suggest effort = revenue). The more copies a mediocre rehash sells, the worse the industry, for the same reason.

I agree with 8-bit. People are still playing battlefield 2 today because it is an amazing game, this is likely going to be the same. Who cares how many they sell by Christmas because the good games end up having a long lasting community.

The truth is that we are so, so overdue a big high-spec multiplayer shooter. Thanks to Halo and then CoD, the attention on this stuff has shifted to consoles. Which is a shame, because the shooter experience on a console is almost always inferior. If this sells serious numbers on the PC, then the format regains some of its rightful claim to being the shooter champion.

I actually don’t care. I don’t see how being able see in game legs suddenly halts the inevitable truth that this is a video game. Especially in Multiplayer where you get a score screen after being killed, and have to wait a few seconds before “respawning”. In singleplayer, where the immersion factor is a thing then maybe being able see your legs adds to that, but in multiplayer I don’t really care. As long as it does not interfere with the gameplay I don’t care. But if having “physical” legs ends up complicating the experience then I’d prefer not to have them. At the end of the day, I’m hitting buttons to do predefined movements. I don’t have control of a muscle system.

So for instance, I don’t want to be “climbing” clumsily over walls where previously I could just jump.

Hmm. I think the immersion in this sort of game doesn’t come from the realism of it but the tension. If fluid animations, great sound design, and pretty explosions make the overall experience more intense, then it’s great. If all it does is add to the visual fidelity of the game, then it’s irrelevant and I’ll be just as immersed in BF2. It’s a TENSE game. Especially when you’re one of the last few men on the ground, and you can see the ticket-counter going down as your three or so allies die off trying to get a grip on the lost spawn point that doomed us.

Personally, I like having legs. It’s nice. There’s a sort of comfort to it that has very little to do with realism and everything to do with familiarity. It’s not that I want the game to be like real combat. It’s that when I’m nervous and jittery and looking for that damned sniper, and I glance down … there’s something reassuring about seeing my feet. I know that’s how it affected me in Mirror’s Edge. I’d be running from men with guns, scrambling for a way out that doesn’t involve lots of bullets, and I’d glance down and see my legs moving like I’d expect them too. Maybe this doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s not about realism for me–it’s about a combination of comfort and atmosphere. I guess a way to explain that, is that I wouldn’t mind if those legs were cybernetic messes of steel and wire. Or if I looked down and saw an hover engine below waist. As long as it made sense with what the game told me I looked and moves like, I’m happy. I quite like magical and science-fiction type fantasies, but I want them to make sense.

Crucially, having footstep noises when I walk, but not having any feet is kind of unsettling.

@ Gwathdring, and any other “I have legs” fans: Quake IV also had player POV legs. Now, don’t get me wrong, Quake IV was not a great game. It did, however, have one of the best shock moments I recall ever having in a game, when my nice legs were SAWN THE FUCK OFF right before my eyes. That was properly damn traumatic.

On the topic of legs in FPSs: I believe this is important not so much because it adds immersion (which is not really a top priority of multiplayer) but because it enhances the player’s sense of solidness and kineticism. I’m getting at that same idea of “feel” provided in links from the last two Sunday Papers: link to pentadact.com Camera movement is also critical in making the player feel like a real entity and not a floating phantasm (in real life, people don’t smoothly glide but bob about).

This is something which can make or break a shooter and I’m glad it’s finally receiving more attention from developers.

Well, considering Strike at Karkand and Sharqi Peninsula are returning, I don’t see why they’d suddenly make the rest of the maps tiny and cramped. There’ll most likely be a couple of gigantic, open, tank heavy maps in there.

on another note, only 3 months to save up for a new graphics card, as I doubt my 6850 can manage this on max settings at a decent consistent framerate, because a game this stunning really deserves being played at max settings. But who knows, maybe they’ll do some miraculous optimizing this time around, I just hope the server browser won’t be broken beyond hope at launch this time around.

They actually have done this in every single battlefield I played, although none of them beat the original and I would be happily listening to the original again with a new video each time I start the game. its my favorite game music.

You do know about Red Orchestra 2 right? WW2 on a modern game engine with small infantry battles, massive tank battles, and everything in between. This does look really good, but I can’t help but think do we really need ANOTHER modern shooter?

Please stop. There have been far more WWII games than modern-day war games, I’m sure of it. The damn war only lasted 6 years, yet it’s been a staple game setting for nearer 15. WWII weapons are uninteresting, with the exception of unscoped single-shot rifles, WWII equipment is uninteresting, WWII vehicles are uninteresting, and being based on history requires things to at least resemble events that happened (all of which have probably been done several times), rather than being new, un-rehashed ideas or settings. I can’t say I’m convinced this will be good, but there’s at least a chance of me getting it, as opposed to no chance if it’s a WWII game.

YMH – you are speaking about past games though (RO2 aside); and another game with Blackhawks is innovative exactly… how? It’s not new at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I will very likely play & and enjoy BF3. But I enjoy variety, and after MW, MW2, BFBC2 and whatever else we got over the last few years I feel a proper remake of BF42 with this engine would be a lot more enjoyable.

While I’m not exactly loathe about this one (it’s the game in 2011 I most want to play, really), I’d love another WW2 Battlefield. There’s a charm, iconography and personality to that period that modern day-set shooters fail to convey.

Having said that, I’m pretty certain that Battlefield Next (whatever in the main series comes out after this ‘un!) will be of a better setting.

Sometimes when I watch the clips I wonder is it real world footage of some poor war ravaged land or is it a game its that bloody good.

This game looks legend TBH I am interested to see how the legs and arms thing works out you.

The 25th October release date means it wont be going head to head with MW3 which from a business point of view I think is the right decision why makes things harder for yourself. I have no doubt that this will go straight in at number one not that that really means anything as far as the games quality goes but Dice do know what they are doing based on their past efforts.

I am thinking about skipping the open beta because I want to just see the finished product then again that could be just wishful June thinking on my part.

Aye, for Battlefield multiplayer there was an awful lot of running around in the open. I’m not saying it doesn’t look pretty, but I don’t really buy games to look at them. Then again, maybe it was just a trailer to translate to the CoD audience. It didn’t manage to capture the scope of battle that Battlefield is renowned for.

I wonder if anyone plans to actually release gameplay footage – that is, the same continuous gameplay without cutting to other gameplay after literally two seconds. Then you could, you know, see if you liked what the game appeared to play like, rather than just going “wow! And a…wait is that…what’s he…cor!…who…what just…oh, one of them…what is this i don’t even…and now where…what’s…um, cool!”

Another thing: why do all Battlefield poster-people have orange glowing armpits/flanks now?

They did a live demo of BF3 on a PC during the EA show, and it was a drawn out tank battle, with lots of nothing much happening in the first quarter or so. Not sure if that’s uploaded anywhere, but yes, they have shown proper gameplay.

My interest in generic manshoots has just about evaporated, but I can’t deny having some fun in BC2. If they address some of the irritations of that game (insta-suicide if out of the “combat zone” for 10 seconds? F OFF) I’ll consider giving it a look. BC2 feels like it wants to be this huge, sprawling combat game, then has maps small enough that your chopper ride from one side to the other takes two seconds, on some maps you can even get sniped at spawn, and you are arbitrarily confined to a certain area even when it would make much more sense for cover to be just a couple of metres over from that hill just there.. oh.. sorry, you committed suicide. It also makes me wonder just how much devs are learning if a game from 2010 features spawn-camping. If they can give the design as much of an overhaul as everything else, I’ll have a look.